Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of video works by Gianfranco Foschino in conjunction with Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. Using a fixed camera and time as his primary media, Foschino captures the subtle variances of the landscape, bringing attention to the effects of light in altering the drama of the natural scene. From peaceful, sun-drenched blue skies, to brooding storm clouds and the uneasy in-between, Foschino brings focused awareness to the celestial changes that are occurring around us at every present moment.

Gianfranco Foschino is a key figure in a new generation of artists from Chile. Recent solo exhibitions include LOCUS, Museo de Artes Visuales (MAVI), Santiago, Chile (2016) and Hidden Stories, Stadtgalerie in Saarbrücken, Germany (2015). He has participated in a number of group exhibitions, including: We Were Here: Absence of the Figure, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA (2016); Unsettled Landscapes, SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico (2014); and Monolith Controversies, 14th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice Biennale (2014); among others.

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new works by Lucia Koch, in conjunction with Pacific Standard Time LA/LA. In No more things. Koch will present a continuation of her Fundos series: photographs of the interiors of empty boxes, bags, and packages, manipulated to house and reflect light and mimic architectural scales. Koch began photographing for the Fundos series in 2001 while reading Paul Auster’s dystopian novel, In the Country of Last Things, which tells the story of a collapsed society with no economy or industry, in which the population must resort to selling scavenged, nearly forgotten objects to survive. In this collection of new photographs, Koch explores the feeling of vacuity when objects become obsolete and only their negative space is left behind. The result is a series of disorienting portals that hint at the inevitable downfall of a materialistic society.

Richard Heller Gallery is pleased to announce, Unearthed Entities, a complex, multi-layered presentation of new and recent paintings by emerging New York-based artist KAJAHL. This is KAJAHL’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.

Working in the traditional medium of oil on canvas, Unearthed Entities explores the history and taxonomy of portraiture. KAJAHL constructs humanoid figures that traverse different cultures and points in human history with elegance. Without a need for chronological consistency or narrative support, KAJAHL carefully pieces together hybrid entities that take on allusions to classical painting, but become disruptive through their divergent multi-faceted origins. Much like Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein, who gave life to a humanoid from non-living matter, KAJAHL seamlessly sews parts together from the fringe of art history into new transformative identities.

KAJAHL’s process entails sifting through history, both amassing and archiving imagery ranging from ancient art, vintage ethnography, historical portraiture and landscape, to strange alternative histories, pseudoscience, and the absurd. In Unearthed Entities, KAJAHL depicts a range of figures such as an alchemist, astronomer, cryptid-like amphibian, high-ranking dignitaries, and a navigational explorer. In this sense, a playful dissonance is achieved in what we would normally presume to be a tradition that depicts heroic leaders from a bygone era.

KAJAHL received his BFA in painting from San Francisco State University in 2007. He studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze, Florence, Italy, in 2008, and received his MFA in painting from Hunter College in New York in 2012. He received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant in 2013 and, in 2016, was a Joan Mitchell Center Artist-in-Residence in New Orleans. KAJAHL lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

KAJAHL will be in attendance at the opening reception on September 9th.

ROSEGALLERY presents PhotoGRAPHIC, an exhibition of the upcoming graphic novel PhotoGRAPHIC: The Life of Graciela Iturbide, published by the J. Paul Getty. Accompanying works by the legendary photographer, ROSEGALLERY will present the novel in its entirety, with original drawings by Zeke Peña and prose by Isabel Quintero. Photographs, illustrations and prose come together to illuminate the artistic power of Iturbide’s life and work. Presenting the multifaceted manifestations of her story, the exhibition opens on 8 September 2017 and runs through 21 October 2017.

Just as in the graphic novel about her life, Graciela Iturbide’s work exists at the intersection of captivating imagery and poetic language. Born in Mexico in 1942, Iturbide studied photography under the Mexican icon Manuel Álvarez Bravo, a contemporary of Tina Modotti, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. With the uniqueness of her own eye, Iturbide captured her surroundings in intimate and empowering expressions. Often highly metaphorical, Iturbide’s photographs visually and poetically connect her own surroundings with a deeper understanding of the world.

Told through text, illustrations and Iturbide’s photographs, PhotoGRAPHIC: The Life of Graciela Iturbide delves into Iturbide’s history and photographic works with the guiding vision of the artist herself. From the Sonora Desert to Juchitán, India and the American South, the graphic novel tells of Iturbide’s explorations throughout the world, all caught through the lens of her camera. In the beginning pages of the graphic novel, it states, “Graciela Iturbide is a photographer. She is an icon. Orgullo mexicano. Maestra.” With her masterfully crafted photographs, Iturbide proves each title true. Iturbide’s exploration of often overlooked and eclectic subjects brings a range of perspectives to her work and her own story. Each image transcends the border between reality and myth. Birds come to her through many of her dreams and often reappear in flight in her photographs, tracing a line through her imagination and her world in the poetic language of their collective motion. Following the trail of birds on the walls of PhotoGRAPHIC, one may glimpse into the rhythm of Iturbide’s vision as her story unfolds.

Team (bungalow) is pleased to announce a show by L.A. photographer Paul Mpagi Sepuya. Entitled Dark Room, the exhibition will run from 17 September through 22 October 2017. The Bungalow is located at 306 Windward Avenue in Venice, CA.

For this exhibition, Sepuya has produced a series of new images that interrogate and challenge the history and nature of photographic portraiture from a queer, black perspective. For Sepuya, his medium is as much about disclosure as concealment, the role of the photographer ultimately one of control. Central to his practice is the undisguised and frequently experimental use of mirrors, which draws the viewer’s attention to the images’ photographic artifice, complicating the experience of looking at a subject, while also engendering a mystifying effect.

A number of the photos on view feature draped black or brown velvet. This particular material – loaded with cultural associations of sensuousness, femininity and blackness – appears alternatively as backdrop and foreground, in the latter instances hiding the photo’s ostensible subject – its “portrait-sitter.” Frequently, that subject is Sepuya himself, although his face is always at least partly obscured. The artist cites Manet’s Olympia as a template for his own practice – a painting in which a pulled back curtain reveals a reclining, nude white woman, gazing confrontationally, even carnivorously, at the viewer, while a barely visible black woman, ostensibly a servant, presents her with flowers. Like that Modernist masterpiece, these photographs explore the possibility that control might stem from a marginalized position, that the role of the pictorially objectified, the consumed image, might in fact possess power.

The space of the studio occupies a powerful and multifaceted position in Sepuya’s work. It serves not only as the exposed site of his artistic production, but also as a vehicle for both literal and metaphorical self-reflection, as well as a complex, even confounding temporal index, through which the artist distills multiple discrete moments in time into a single image. Several photos show his studio with collages hanging from its ceiling, obscuring all but a sliver of the space itself. The two-dimensional assemblages’ constituent materials are mostly historic pictures by the likes of Cecil Baton, Carl Van Vechten and Richard Bruce Nugent. Other works are constructed by placing a mirror in front of a dark background; this technique has the effect of setting into stark relief the otherwise latent accumulation of handprints and dust on the mirror’s surface, these markings appearing as obscuring, smoke-like abstract forms. All of these works conflate multiple tenses, using the photographic medium to flatten and controvert our perceptions of the passage of time.

The men in Sepuya’s photographs are always intimate relations: friends, lovers and peers. This creates a powerful, even discomfiting sense of familiarity, effecting the partial erasure of the division between personal and public realms of knowledge. Institutions do not privilege so-called gossip and its effects on artists’ work and lives – a fact lamented in the art historian Gavin Butt’s 2005 treatise on the subject Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948-1963. Sepuya, too, combats this notion, using his private life as the raw material for his practice, exploring the overlapping and intersecting roles of desire, friendship and creative collaboration in his relationships, inviting the viewer into his own queer erotic subjectivity.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya was born in 1982 outside Los Angeles. He lived in New York for fourteen years, before returning to LA in late 2014. He has shown extensively both stateside and abroad.